A new treatment for patients with life-threatening infectious diseases is being pioneered in Melbourne by researchers at The Alfred and Monash University. VICPhage, a clinical partnership between The Alfred and Monash, is one of the first in Australia to offer end-to-end capacity in phage therapy to treat some of the most challenging infections.

It involves injecting a patient with viruses called bacteriophages, or phages for short, to kill bacterial infections that have not responded to other treatments.

Professor Anton Peleg, Director of the Department of Infectious Diseases at The Alfred and Monash University and the Center to Impact AMR at Monash University, is co-lead of VICPhage and senior author of a new paper published in Nature Medicine.